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Is a debugger planned for Chanka?

Nemesis

New member
First and foremost, I want to congratulate all the people involved in this project for what they've managed to do in such a short space of time. I've been waiting for DC emulation for quite a few years, and it's great to see it finally becoming a reality.

Anyway, I want to ask the people involved on this project if they plan to release a version of Chancast in the future that includes a debugger. This is both a question and a request. I understand that it's still early days and these projects take a lot of time, but I'm just getting in early. I'm mainly interested in DC emulation for hacking purposes, and for that, merely playing the games isn't enough. You need some feedback on what's happening behind the scenes. It really boils down to what you're making the emulator for I guess. Most emulators are written to play the games, and they stop there and never go much further.

I don't know what kind of debugging features you already have in place, but honestly, some of the amasingly simple stuff that can be put in place in 5 minutes is some of the most useful. You know the kind of stuff I'd like, so I won't bother listing it all. Suffice to say, I'd very much like to see debug features included in future Chankast releases. Even the quick and dirty stuff you no doubt have in place for your own debugging purposes would be awesome at this point. If you'd make a release of Chankast with these features activated, that'd be awesome, though if not, I can accept that.
 

Evrain

The Forbidden One
For sure a debug version of Chanka exists, however I have seen no trace of debug code as I was hacking the exe.
Evrain
 

FunKing

New member
Homebrew servers

Hello, World! :)

I agree with Nemesis on what he said. Chankast is an incredible piece of software, and I am very happy to see what you have done until now. It's amazing!

I guess you (the Chankast team) might have some kind of "road map" for this project. Perhaps you plan to fix bugs, then add modem/BBA/serial port emulation later (or *much* later)...

But if you could release the next version with some debug functions (as seen on some WIP screenshots on several forums), other people would be able to do the next step: create the server code for the games.

There's no use for Chankast to have network emulation if most of the games need a special server software. So, if you release a version with debug functions, we could help finding out where/why some games are having problems, and also try to find out what the games do/expect from a server packet. With that, we could create homebrew servers.

Of course, even with the help of a good disassembler/debugger, and Chankast, it is *a lot* of work to find out the stuff needed to reverse engineer the protocol of the games, but there's no other choice for the games that are not online anymore (we can capture the packets from those still online, so those might be a lot easier to reproduce).

I'm interested in giving my time and efforts to such a task (and I'm sure more people are willing to do the same). BTW, I'm already analyzing a game... and I think that Chankast might be the tool that could accelerate a lot this kind of project.

Any thoughts, ideas, comments, etc. are welcome.
 

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